The Burning White (120 page)

Of course the red remained.

His gift was gone. Of course it was.

And his brother was gone. Sevastian, the one last good thing in this world was gone.

And yet Gavin lived, still. As ever.

Then he saw a familiar figure. The old prophet was sitting over at the edge of the tower, watching the sunset, heedless of the slow cascade of blood, sitting in it, apparently unperturbed by the mess. Apparently, the bloodfall from above had alarmed the old man and spurred him to make the last bit of the climb to find out what the hell was going on.

Gavin wondered how big the gap had been when Orholam had jumped it. Probably small. Old bastard.

Gavin walked over toward him. The sword was on the way. He picked it up, bloody as it was from the endless stream pouring past it. Gavin was exhausted. What was he gonna do? Hack apart the mirror, hoping it accomplished something?

He’d carried this damn blade halfway across the world. What had it done for him? It was as useless as he was.

He was sick of it. Sick of his own shit.

Without thinking too much—hell, he’d thought too much for his whole life—he simply threw the blade.

The throw was as pathetic and weak as he was, in body and in will; he couldn’t even commit to throwing it hard. He threw it sort of to Orholam, sort of at him, and sort of toward the edge, that it might fall into oblivion.

He didn’t even choose, merely tossed it away. But then, it was trash, like his plans; he didn’t care about it anymore.

The blade clattered and slid and stopped short of the edge and Orholam both.

The old prophet turned and looked at it, then at Gavin, then turned back to looking at the horizon without taking any more interest.

Gavin strode over to the old man.

The old man didn’t respond, so Gavin sat. He dangled his feet off the edge of the bloody tower.

Orholam didn’t say a word. Gavin was reminded of their days rowing together. After a long hard day of rowing, sometimes, a rest would come, and they would simply sit. In such times, there would be no chatter. Bone-weary, there was nothing to say, but there was a silent communion in the rest from their mutual labor.

As they had then, now in the cool of the evening, they sat together.

What did anything matter now? There was no rush. It was too late. Someone else was steering the ship. Someone else calling the cadence. A broken-down slave wasn’t going to change history.

Gavin was about to be cut free from his oar and tossed overboard; he was human jetsam.

In his dream of this tower top, Gavin had begged the approaching giant for more time; he’d wanted to fix things. Fix himself, he supposed, as he’d held his black-marbled heart in his hands, as if he could disentangle the living and the dead flesh knotted together using instruments as blunt and clumsy as his fingers.

The truth was, he was hopelessly broken, and time wasn’t going to fix him. Now he was out of time. But maybe he’d been out of time for years. If he’d had another century, he would still be himself.

But a stillness descended on him as he sat there with the old man. He beheld the horizon, and though he saw only in a bichromatic palette made painful by his recent vision of the sunset in full color on the other side of the glass, he was filled to overflowing with wonder. What was absent to his blinded eyes was yet
there
.

He could remember beauty, could remember how this gray-scale tone would correspond to a lemon yellow blushing to sweet tangerine. Velvet violet was stitched with subtle seams into the soft samite blanket of night, embroidered with silver points of light.

It was there, and he knew it was there, knew it was more real than what his eyes could presently see.

“What do you miss most?” Orholam asked quietly, not turning.

They’d failed together, Gavin supposed. Orholam had climbed up here, after he’d been ‘told’ not to come, and perhaps he believed now he was being punished for his disobedience by finding nothing here. His world had to be shit right now, too.

What came to mind wasn’t what Gavin expected, though.

“When I called down that . . . holocaust at Sundered Rock, I didn’t know what it was going to do. Not exactly. I mean, I knew it was going be bad, but . . . I came to, standing there, naked. The black just devoured
everything
. And that hot day turned cold. Bitter cold. Frigid. Even my brother’s body was cold. I couldn’t tell how long it had been—if I’d been unconscious on my feet for hours, or if the hell-stone magic sucked in even heat and it had only been moments.

“You know, I was the one person on that battlefield who should have understood what had happened, and I was . . . baffled. My skin was hairless in spots, but unharmed otherwise, but my clothes had disintegrated? I felt I had broken the world, like I’d cracked open an egg and something terrible had been released. But in that moment, there, among the dead . . . even the dying didn’t seem to moan. Or maybe I was deaf. I don’t know, but it was so still, as if a ripple of what I’d done was traveling out to infinity. Amid all that, I experienced this moment out of time, as if passing realms had locked here and the pressure had built until the earth heaved and everything fractured. Suddenly the landscape was changed, and you could only pray that the tensions had been relieved and that the aftershocks wouldn’t destroy you.

“Something had happened that was bigger than I could even understand . . . but it had passed, and these stupid, normal, boring-ass concerns came rushing back. Like: I was naked. And I couldn’t find my friends. And first it, it, it wasn’t even that I was afraid they were all dead or that I’d killed them. I couldn’t even think that far ahead. I only knew I was
lonely
. After all that? After this conflagration of magic the likes of which no one had ever seen or even heard of? No one cared if some guy on the battlefield was naked and his hair didn’t look right or some shit. But I was
cold
, and I saw Gavin had clothes and there—at the end of the fucking world!—it made me remember this one time when we were kids.

“We’d stopped on one of the little islands my father owned on our way between Rath and Big Jasper and we snuck out late one night and hiked up the mountain to look for this old ruin—which we’d been forbidden to do, of course. And we’d been going for hours and there was a sudden storm, and I’d left my cloak back at my room, and I thought Gavin was going to tell me what an idiot I was. He’d even reminded me to bring it. But instead of mocking me or hitting me—” Gavin’s voice cracked suddenly. He had to clear his throat hard. “Instead Gavin . . . Gavin hugged me under one arm and gave me his cloak. He said he was too hot. The damn liar. Asked me if I’d wear it home for him.”

Gavin cleared his throat, irritated. “He didn’t deserve—I mean, at Sundered Rock I was naked and stupidly embarrassed about it and he had clothes and was dead, and I, I just took them. It seemed really practical, you know? He didn’t need ’em, right? But I looked back at it, and I stripped the dead like a looter. I stripped my brother’s corpse like a grave robber. It was like I’d planned, you know, with Corvan. I mean, it was one possible outcome of like six: set a bunch of smoky red luxin on fire, come out as Gavin, take charge of his armies and pretend to be him . . . I’ve never had a plan go so flawlessly and so poorly.

“After that I used black luxin again, on purpose. To wipe out some memories. And I . . . what I was left with was my hero worship for my big brother. Like remembering that night in the storm. I thought he was the perfect Prism, that I could never measure up to him. I tried to be what I thought he’d been. And in the last couple years . . . I’ve seen and started to remember all the terrible shit my brother did. His cruelty. His meanness and fear. Some of it excusable because he was a child and scared and . . . and some of it not, not at all, regardless. And you know, learning about who he really was—seeing the truth about him? It’s been like losing him all over again. My family was shit, and I was shit, but I had a hero, and then I lost him for a second time. He wasn’t ever who I’d thought he was. He did some awful, awful shit I can never forgive him for. But at the same time . . . he wasn’t all bad. He was still the big brother who gave me his cloak.”

Gavin had to swallow again.

“So I guess, you know, I guess I miss my big brother. And I miss Sevastian. And I miss my mother, who never let me in all the way, even though she loved me. I trusted her and she had my back, but she didn’t trust me. Not with the truth. She was ashamed, I guess. And I miss my father, or the man he was before all this . . . I miss the man he should’ve become. The grandfather he should’ve been to Kip. I miss Kip, and the father
I
should’ve become
for him
. I miss all the things I cost me. I miss Karris, and the great years I should’ve had with her. I miss Corvan, who was my best friend, and who I abandoned. I . . . shit. I miss things that never were and mourn things that ought to have been. Ridiculous, huh? It doesn’t matter now. It’s too late.”

Gavin tried to shake it off, finally turning to look at the old prophet with a lopsided half grin. “So, should I complain some more about my unhappy decades as the richest, most powerful and admired man in the world? It’s all pretty much the same, though: ‘Ugh, all this rich food doesn’t taste good while I’m feeling so guilty.’ ‘Poor me! All these women want me, but I’m in love with one who I’ve given good reason to hate me.’ The story’s a real tearjerker! But what about you? What were you doing then, Orholam? Oh, you were enslaved and chained to the oar all those years? Beaten daily, nearly drowned a dozen times? Yeah . . . that does sound
almost
as bad as I had it. So, you know, maybe I can be done.” He turned up the corners of his mouth and gestured over to the old man. “But really. I’ve gone on enough. What was your family like before the whole call-to-prophecy-and-running-away thing happened? What do
you
miss?”

Orholam cocked his head, lips curling in a smile. “Can I tell you a story?”

“It
is
your turn,” Gavin said.

“Not my story.”

“Meh, it’s still your turn. Maybe a cryptic parable will do me good.” Gavin doubted it, but he owed the old man this much, and he was embarrassed at how he’d gone on.

Orholam said, “After Dazen Guile killed his brother at Sundered Rock, he built a prison. Not one cell or two, but an eightfold prison.”

“Uh. Look, I know this story. How ’bout that cryptic parable instead? A prophecy? You can even make it rhyme. I can’t even tell you how ready I am for some awkward rhyming couplets that don’t quite fit a meter.”

Orholam said nothing, and Gavin felt like an asshole. “I just said I’d listen, and I interrupted first thing, didn’t I?”

Orholam said nothing.

Gavin sighed. “I built it because I went mad. I wasted—”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“In your climb through the seven circles to reach this, the roof of the world, you’ve seen that you were worse than you knew. It’s time for you to see that you were also better.”

“Better?”

“Dazen built those prisons because he knew what men had wrought. In seeking immortality and power, man had released the infernals into this world. The gods of old, the immortals, could walk here. The Chromeria had obscured the knowledge as well as it could, but such could not be hidden forever. And so Dazen dedicated himself, alone, to fighting those whom the Chromeria denies even exist. He discovered that to wield the greatest power, the infernals have to partner with a human host, a drafter who will share her or his body with them. And so to expiate his sins, Dazen became a hunter. Not a hunter of wights, but rather of the powers who prey upon those dying drafters called wights, all over the world.”

“This . . . isn’t . . .”

“He couldn’t kill these gods. That took something beyond him, something he didn’t have, the Blinding Knife, which his brother and father had lost. But he, who so often did what others called impossible, did the impossible once more. With the greatest secrecy and cunning, one at a time, he imprisoned eight of the immortals. One for each of the seven Chromeria-recognized colors, and one of the greater elohim in the black prison. Chi and paryl were too rare or too careful for him to find, and white, he was certain, was a myth.”

“What are you—” But Gavin’s throat was tight. It was hard to breathe. Why was it hard to breathe?

Orholam said, “So it was that after he had imprisoned these immortals, he came to believe that the only person who might undo his labors was he himself, for he knew himself corruptible and corrupted already. So rather than seek more power, this remarkable hero sought to throw his power away: he brought death and oblivion into his own heart. This true Prism sacrificed what was more precious to him than even his own life—he sacrificed his Guile memory and his own reputation, even in his own mind.”

“No,” Gavin said. He could barely form words over the encroaching tears, could barely breathe. It was impossible. It was lies. “No. That’s all very flattering, but you don’t know. You don’t know me.”

But then he remembered the voices from his prisons. They hadn’t known him. They hadn’t spoken quite right. If he’d cast bits of
himself
into those walls, they’d have spoken to him differently. The infernals cast into those walls hadn’t known what lies the others had told him, so each had tried its own tack against him, bluffing.

The last one had cursed him, called him
That was a tongue Gavin had never known, nor Dazen, either. It was a word not made for human throats. It was the slip that should have given the whole game away.